Last night, despite a persistent cough, I went to an interesting if somewhat old-fashioned seminar at UCL in which Professor Patrick Pollard examined the French reception of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Briefly commenting on Charles Grolleau's 1900 translation, Professor Pollard then discussed in rather more detail and with rather more enthusiasm, André Gide's subsequent translation of 1922. He argued that whereas the former praised Blake as an idiosyncratic English poet, painter, and mystic, the latter saw him as very much part of a nonconformist tradition of writers which would include Baudelaire, Whitman, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche; authors who liked to flirt with evil and prided themselves on their immoralism.
One author whom Gide did not name as part of this satanic pantheon - and his absence was a glaring omission - was Oscar Wilde. Of course, we all know the reason for his exclusion. Quite simply, Wilde's ghost continued to haunt and torment Gide as much as the living figure, whom he encountered several times as a young man, scared the pants off him.
Gide, in my view - though I don't think I'm alone in this, - never fully acknowledged his intellectual and aesthetic indebtedness to Wilde and, despite his attraction to diabolical characters and pederastic pleasures, never fully accepted the profound challenge which Wilde presented to his own thinking and his own sexuality.
Ultimately, I think of Gide as something of a coward, ever-fearful of losing his precious soul; the sort of man who would hurry home to write to his mother after spending time in Wilde's company that the latter was a terrible human being and the most dangerous product of modern civilization.
His great success as a writer and existential humanist, contrasts tellingly with the Irishman's spectacular failure on all fronts. Gide wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and lives to a ripe old age; Wilde gets a prison sentence and dies exiled and in poverty, aged just 46.
Informed by Wilde during one of their final meetings that, in art, there is no first person, Gide simply smiles and carries on exploring subjective depths and confessing what he sincerely believed to be his essential self. He never quite understands Wilde's transgressive philosophy or love of masks, anymore than he understands Nietzsche's revaluation of all values.
That's fine. But his own rather smug face and his attempt to read these authors in line with his own project is not and I find that I don't much care for M. Gide (despite the fact that the Catholic Church placed his work on their Index of Forbidden Books after his death in 1951).
That's fine. But his own rather smug face and his attempt to read these authors in line with his own project is not and I find that I don't much care for M. Gide (despite the fact that the Catholic Church placed his work on their Index of Forbidden Books after his death in 1951).
